One of my first serious jobs in life was as an Ontario Hydro clerk, working in the construction drawing office of the Pickering “B” nuclear power plant as it was being built. Like Pickering “A”, the operational plant beside it, Pickering “B” would eventually encompass four Candu reactors.

A good friend was a quality control tester on the site. Amongst other measures, his team would use X-ray and ultrasound to inspect for faults in all welded joints in piping that would carry radioactive content. The advantage of this friendship was that, on a near-weekly basis, I was given a guided tour, right into the very heart of what would become operating nuclear reactors.

The calandria, the reactor core, is a remarkable sight. But I confess I was even more impressed with the laser technology technicians used to precisely align the fuel tubes in which the very power of God would be unleashed.

More impressive still was the monstrous turbine hall, where steam generated by the controlled nuclear reaction would generate electricity — the raison d’être of the facility. Equally impressive and just as disturbing: the spent fuel bay where radioactive fuel rods would — and will — languish until we figure out some method — any method — of safely stashing them away for the next few thousand years.

I continue to marvel at the simplicity of the emergency containment building, a massive concrete structure whose interior is empty and in a vacuum. In the event of a nuclear incident, the building’s sole function is to act like a wet/dry shop vac of last resort. Anything sucked into the building is then cooled by water released from giant tanks in its ceiling.

But more than anything else, what sticks with me from the experience is a conversation I had with one of Hydro’s engineers. “Is nuclear power really safe?” I asked. “It’s absolutely safe,” he replied without hesitation. “Until something goes wrong.”

In the intervening 30 years, the world has witnessed the truth and profundity of that statement at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. For most of us, nuclear meltdown — remember The China Syndrome? — replaced the Cold War threat of thermonuclear warfare as our doomsday scenario.

And now there’s Japan.

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell offers a fascinating dissection of commercial airliner crashes. Unlike U.S. Airways Flight 1549 that landed in the Hudson River after its engines fell victim to a flock of birds, the typical crash, he says, doesn’t result from a single traceable cause. An initial and manageable problem or error is compounded by another, and yet another, until disaster is literally the unavoidable conclusion.

Yes, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Japan use different designs than our Candu reactors, but compounded problems and errors is a common thread in all three disasters. Only arrogance would prompt us to believe that our combination of technology and humanity is uniquely “fail safe.”

The Japanese, we’re told, planned brilliantly for an earthquake, but didn’t consider the possibility of a quake-generated tsunami. Diesel generators that might have averted nuclear disaster had they been mounted well above ground level were instead choked useless by flood waters. Thomas Homer-Dixon suggests our ingenuity is outpaced by the ever-increasing complexity of the world we’ve created; so much so that we overlook, in hindsight, the blindingly obvious.

The McGuinty government caved to crass politics in its stall on off-shore wind farms. The Wolfe Island wind farm — and others proposed like it — have become highly controversial, in part because of feared, but as-yet undetermined, health impacts on nearby residents, and in part because project opponents’ forces will use all available ammunition.

In the meantime, not so far down the Lake Ontario waterfront, just this side of Oshawa, environmental hearings will open Monday on the proposed construction of an additional reactor at Ontario Power Generation’s Darlington nuclear plant.

Given current technology, wind power can’t possibly replace other sources of electricity generation. But we’re at best short-sighted if we pretend that wind power poses some form of health risk and nuclear power is benign. Worse, that a reactor in someone else’s backyard beats a wind turbine in our own. On most days, we can get away with that sort of naiveté. And then something goes wrong.

David Morris is a Kingston-based writer and strategist and former member of the Whig-Standard Community Editorial Board. He blogs at

http://davidmorrisjourneys. word press.com/

View original article via Nuclear power is safe — until something goes horribly wrong – The Whig Standard – Ontario, CA.